Miles For Days

Dear Family,

So this week started out with President Kearl, who is the first counselor in the mission presidency, he lives in Milford but he covers a lot of ground. He has been going up to the Sioux Falls stake that joined our mission a few months ago, and that is a 4 hour drive from here, so he has been busy. He took us on the outskirts of Gresham in his Mercedes. It was pretty fun and we finally got him on the ride home to show us the power it had, so next thing I know we're flying down the highway, it was super fun!! :)  

Anyway, back to the spiritual stuff, we went and saw the "V" family. The dad wasn't there, he was at his AA meeting and that's better for him than seeing us. We were able to talk to Sis V and their daughter and talked about how we can best help the dad. A is just waiting to get the ok from her dad so that she can be baptized. We will be coming back here to help him with some welding stuff. Elder Hansen will be able to help him with that and I'll just be doing some grunt work or something. I'll do whatever, as long as we get to help and talk to him. 

Wednesday we had Zone Training so we were in Lincoln for a while, but that night, we were finally able to have a church tour with the "H" family. It was funny, Grandpa came and he was there for like 5 min. then just left because he saw everything that he wanted to see. LOL!! He is so grumpy and crabby all the time, but is so funny!! Church tour went great and we just so happened to plan it when the young men and young women would be there so Taylor was able to meet some of the girls! :)

Thursday was a day in the car. Today was the last day for the 3 month mile allotment and we still had a lot of miles left we could use! So, we tried to use them all! We had a lot left because we didn't have to go into Lincoln twice so that gave us a good amount of miles to use. So we went to Seward, Stapelhurst, Ulysses and Friend. We went about 130 miles in one day and we still have 60 miles left over. We were just going through the list and tried people that we haven't tried before.

Friday we went to Mark and Laurie's for dinner and Mark took us to his hobby room and showed us all his table top characters he makes, his swords and axes, both real and for LARPing, he showed us his chain mail he is making and all his Pokemon cards and magic cards. He has so much $$$ in that stuff! He talked to us for like an hour and by the time we had dinner, talked to him and ate pie, it was time for us to go. 

We also had Stake Conference and Elder Carlson and Elder Scott of the 70 were there. Elder Scott has only been in for a month, he hit the mic and was straight up and bold about his talk about the Sabbath Day. We also slept over at the Zone Leaders place to save miles, we had fun!

We also had a cool experience this week with "B" She comes and helps out at the Foodnet and we just give each other a hard time and make fun of each other. She talks like a sailor but is starting to catch some of her words when she is around us. It's kinda funny when she catches herself, you can tell she's trying really really hard to hold it back. We went up to her place and talked outside for a while and to keep it short...she's had a really crappy life.  Elder Hansen felt prompted to leave a Book of Mormon with her and she said she would read it. Then the next day, she sent us a 6 page text thanking us for coming over and how we asked more about her before we just left her with a Book of Mormon. She said she got in trouble at work for reading it and can only read it during break now..but hey!! That's fine with us! We will be going to see her today after P-day, we are going to help clean out her gutters and chop some wood. She's in her early 30's and has had an interesting life so far.

I think that covers my week, Dallin and Chris keep rubbing it in that they have iPads in their missions now and make sure they send me pics of it and just how nice they are. I don't think my mission will get them till I go home, so I don't have to worry about it!!

Love, Elder Searle